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My 350Mb connection is throttled to 10Mb

ProTofik
On our wavelength

Hi,

I have been Virgin Media (and NTL) customer for the past 12 years. Starting with 2Mb/s connection, I went through multiple upgrades, currently at 350Mb/s.

In the past weeks or maybe months, I have noticed that as soon as I turn torrenting on any computer or server in my house on, the WAN download connection drops to 10Mb/s flat on every device in the house (total). On top of that, I experience massive, 25% packet drops (tested by ping -t 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8). Turn torrent off, and bam, problem solved.

 

My SuperHub 3 is setup in modem mode. My edge firewall is virtualized pfSense 2.4.4 and VLAN routing is done on Cisco 3560CX. Pretty basic setup that works fine.

 

Has Virgin Media introduced some sort of policy recently that throttles customer's connection down to make it feel like 2007 again for torrenting, or is my SuperHub 3 modem acting up?

 

Paying over £50 for 10Mb connection does not seem like a good deal for me any more. There are unthrottled 70/20 options out there for half the price.

151 REPLIES 151

legacy1
Alessandro Volta

It would seem like VM are throttling you when torrenting but it should not effect other connections when torrenting.

When you stop torrenting your speed returns and what about packet loss?

Can you connect the torrenting PC to the modem mode and test your speed like that?

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ProTofik
On our wavelength

Yes, the whole WAN link goes down to 10Mb/s total few seconds after I switch the torrent on. The moment I turn torrent off, I wait 2-3 seconds and packet loss is gone, pings are down from 120ms to 15ms (for 1.1.1.1), and internet speed is back to 350Mb/s. 

 

I don't feel comfortable connecting my PC directly to the internet, but I guess I can do it later on

 

legacy1
Alessandro Volta
What torrent program do you have so I can test this end?

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ProTofik
On our wavelength

qbittorrent

 

Just to clarify, it will speed up to 20-30MB/s and after few seconds (sometimes a minute) it will drop down to flat 1MB/s. It is clearly visible in the qbittorrent graph as well as on my edge firewall. 

legacy1
Alessandro Volta
You might of downloaded so much that you are one of VM top downloaders and so they are limiting you?

Downloaded ubuntu at full speed.

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Anonymous
Not applicable

VM do not limit people in this manner.

OP perhaps ensure that your upload speed is limited well below the maximum 20Mb on the service, perhaps to 10Mb, and check the maximum number of connections the application is allowed to open and consider lowering it if you have a lot of torrents you are handling at once.

Sounds like either the upload is getting maxed out which is drowning out acknowledgements and slowing the download or the Superhub isn't enjoying the amount of connections it's having to handle and is struggling a bit.

wez
Fibre optic

We torrent all the time, although I did find unless I limited the number of simultaneous downloads it did affect the speed across the house.

I limit to ten and have had no issues since.

ProTofik
On our wavelength

I am well aware that a huge number of connections can choke cheap network devices, but I don't believe this is the case here. I've been using superhub 3 for a year or two now, and problem only started appearing in the past few weeks/months. I haven't made any changed to my network or torrent client settings in the past few months.

 

Anyway, as other suggested I have connected one of my computers directly to Virgin SuperHub (in modem mode so my PC had public IP address) and started qbittorrent with just one torrent set to download. As expected, my connection got immediately throttled to 10Mb/s. Browsing internet became almost impossible, and packet loss I experienced was at around 30% (ping -t test).

 

If Virgin is definitely sure they're not throttling torrents, what else could be the issue here? I have downloaded few games today via steam and origin today, about 100GB. I had nice 45MB/s the entire time and stable connection. As soon as I put torrent on, it just all goes down to 1MB/s.

 

Rule_C
Forum Team (Retired)
Forum Team (Retired)

Hi Protofik.

 

Thanks for reaching out. I appreciate that you're having this issue when torrent is on.

 

We can definitely confirm that we don't 'throttle' and traffic management no longer applies with us.

 

We'd definitely love to look into this for you. We'd like to look into your account and do further diagnostics and we can do this via online chat.

 

Let us know how you get on.

 

Rule_C